Thomson, aka Thomson Grass Valley, has so far dominated all of the DVB-H mobile TV trials around the world, but until now it had completely ignored the opportunity on its own front door, to bring ATSC M/H services to market.
It well and truly addressed that at the NAB conference and exhibition in Las Vegas this week, producing an end to end product line, just the same as it did for DVB-H, just in time for the market to take off.
Thomson Grass Valley is on the bloc from its French parent company and may lose the ‘Thomson’ part of its name before the year is over if anyone steps forward to pay the prerequisite amount to take the business of Thomson’s hands.
The new ATSC M/H system is soup to nuts, existing transmitters, with repeaters and gap fillers, a software upgrade to its ADAPT-IV digital exciter, which sits alongside its Elite, DCX Paragon, and DCX Millennium transmitter families.
It also features the company’s ViBE encoder family which works tightly knit with its NetProcessor 9030 multiplexer, and a separate ATSC-M/H transport stream generator, as well as the Jade ESG server, with central management provided by its XMS service management platform. Even Nokia, which virtually invented mobile TV, doesn’t offer that well integrated a set up in its favored DVB-H system.
“The ATSC proposals focus on compatibility with existing digital television transmissions,” said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley. “Because of our vast experience in digital signal handling at every step of the content chain we have been able to develop robust solutions which are fully compatible with the emerging standard, fully compatible with existing broadcast systems ‘ and fully compatible with today’s tight budgets. The pre-integrated system is ready today to provide a stable test platform which can quickly move to implementation and reduce the time to market for broadcasters keen to move into mobile television.”
So if there are new broadcasters ready to join the 70 TV stations that have already made a commitment to ATSC mobile TV in the US, then Grass Valley has put itself in the line up against the existing offerings from Harris and Rohde and Schwarz, although both of these are really transmitter manufacturers and have to partner for most of the other steps in the chain.
Its success in this new market must depend on how rapidly suitors come forward and what type of company those potential buyers are in nature. One line of thinking has it that Harris will buy it, but then it would have to drop the transmitter range. Others think that a telecommunications equipment supplier such as Ericsson might take a look, because although it has encoding assets in Tandberg, it has none of the other assets that make up mobile TV. On the other hand Ericsson is supposed to believe that streaming is the way forward for video to the handset, not broadcasting.
The company says that product development plans are unaffected by the For Sales sign over its head and the company says that customers are still confident enough to continue placing large orders. Our bet is that before Thomson finds a buyer, sales will come back and it may never sell the company.